Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Opinion

All I Want for Christmas…

By

is for you to sign the petition here: http://petitions.listentous.org.au/detail/index/pid/17

RIVERS NEED ESTUARIES CAMPAIGN LAUNCHED

Biologist Dr Jennifer Marohasy has launched the Australian Environment Foundation, AEF, campaign’Rivers Need Estuaries’ to have the current Murray Darling Basin Authority draft plan completely revised to prioritise restoring the Murray River estuary.

Dr Marohasy announced that the campaign’s petition would call on the federal parliament to recognise the estuary should be restored by re-engineering or removing the 7.6 kilometres of barrages, in part or whole, to allow inflows from the Southern Ocean.

The AEF maintains that restoring the estuary through removal of the barrages should be the priority of the basin plan as it would allow for savings of hundreds of gigalitres of water during times of drought, water currently wasted attempting to maintain artificial levels of freshwater in the Lower Lakes during the last drought.

Over 800 gigalitres (equal to 800,000 Olympic swimming pools) evaporates from the Lower Lakes each year.

“Communities are being asked to give up further large amounts of water to prop up this badly managed Lower Lakes system that has been degraded by the barrages since they were completed in 1941.

“The current MDBA draft plan fails to address this fundamental issue.”

The peer-reviewed scientific literature, unlike many recent government reports, recognises that the barrages have destroyed the estuary.

The campaign has the support of communities across the basin as they face further cuts to water allocations without any specific environmental benefits so far articulated in the draft plan.

The Rivers Need Estuaries campaign petition to be tabled in the House of Representatives details the major objectives of the campaign.

This petition of concerned citizens of Australia draws to the attention of the House:

Despite past dire predictions, the Murray Darling Basin has not been lost to salt or drought. However, upstream water storages are not large enough to keep the Lower Lakes supplied with adequate freshwater during protracted drought. Furthermore, the 7.6 kilometres of concrete barrages that created this artificial freshwater system have destroyed the Coorong-Murray River estuary. 


The petitioners request that the Australian parliament recognise that: 


1. Restoring the Coorong-Murray River estuary must be a priority in any Murray Darling Basin Plan.

2. The estuary should be restored by re-engineering or removing the barrages in part or whole to allow inflows from the Southern Ocean.

3. Adelaide’s water supply can be secured by building a lock downstream from Tailem Bend.

THEREFORE – We petition the members of the House to act to restore the natural estuarine environment of the Lower Lakes and Coorong.

Sign the petition here: http://petitions.listentous.org.au/detail/index/pid/17

’cause it’s all I want for Christmas.

More Adjusting of Temperature Records

By

Hi Jen,

For some time I’ve been popping in to your blog to relate my region’s monthly weather extremes, based on the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s own records. The highlight was always the mean monthly maximum, since every month had its hottest max between 1910 and 1919, with the exception of August, which was hottest in 1946. These are the records as they have stood for many years on the the Elders website under Kempsey climatology. http://www.eldersweather.com.au/nsw/mid-north-coast/kempsey

No more!

The hottest months by mean max have all been changed. Every single one. If you look at the fine print, you’ll find the explanation: the temp data is now from 1965 to 2010. No doubt the BOM can adduce good scientific reasons for this…and who reads fine print anyway?

So there you have it: our searing decade around WW1 has not been eliminated from memory by any Orwellian measures.

It’s just been taken off the page.

If a careless reader might think those were cooler times – his own fault!

To add to the perfectly legal distortion, our rainfall records extend from 1882 to 2010, so a careless reader might think the temp records also fall within that period. The only downside of this for the BOM: all our monthly records for drought were set between 1882 and 1957. I wonder when all that will be removed from the page, with a little fine print in explanation.

Thought this might interest.
Appreciate your work mightily.

Rob

No Climate Debt Owed to Developing Countries: International Climate Science Coalition

By

Ottawa, Canada, December 11, 2011: “Developed nations are not guilty of causing the climate change that developing nations claim they are suffering,” said Tom Harris, executive director of ICSC which is headquartered in Ottawa, Canada. “Climate changes all the time—both warming and cooling—due to natural causes and there is nothing that we can do to stop it. However, to the degree possible, and considering our economic circumstances, developed nations still have a moral obligation to devote a proportion of their foreign aid to helping the world’s most vulnerable people adapt to natural climate events.”

[Read more…] about No Climate Debt Owed to Developing Countries: International Climate Science Coalition

Healthy Country Means less Water for South Australia

By

IT is assumed in the draft Murray Darling Basin Plan that the more water in the Murray River and in particular the more water moving down the river to South Australia, the healthier the environment. But what’s the philosophical basis for such an assumption?

As I wrote in my column for The Land newspaper this week:

If the current water reform process is truly about giving back to the environment, then we should be thinking back to a period before rivers and creeks became constricted by sheets of water running off compacted soils, before swamps were diverted, before river de-snagging and before the blasting of rock bars for paddle steamers.

As historian Bill Gammage notes in The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, back in the dreamtime shallow streams and overflows flushed more of Australia, filling billabongs, swamps and holes, and recharging springs and soaks.

That was a time when the health of a landscape was measured less by how much water was in a river, and more by how many kangaroos it could support.

In 1901 James Cotton, a Cobar pioneer, wrote that before the district was stocked with sheep and cattle it was covered with a heavy growth of natural grasses and that the ground was soft, spongy and very absorbent.

Overstocking was a problem throughout the Murray Darling Basin particularly during the late 1800s resulting in significant land and water degradation. Overstocking transformed soils in many districts from soft and spongy to hard clay that, instead of absorbing water, caused the rain to run off in sheets as fast as it fell – to again paraphrase Mr Cotton.

In the past one hundred years there has been a gradual improvement in land management. Stocking rates have fallen, some native grasses are returning and there has been a move to minimum tillage conservation farming practices. This has resulted in a general improvement in soil structure.

The ground may not be as soft, spongy and very absorbent as it once was, but there is no doubt that when the rain now falls on the Murray Darling, much less water runs off into adjacent rivers and streams than it did one hundred years ago. This must have implications for the amount of water flowing to South Australia.

Indeed a truly healthier Murray Darling Basin would mean less water for South Australia.

******
My entire column can be read on page 9 of The Land – in newsagents now.

Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Allen & Unwin, 2011. I got my copy from Dymock’s in Sydney for $49.99; and bought another as a Christmas present.

Why Use Asbestos?

By

ASBESTOS can kill you. So Kevin Rudd wants it banned. It was the lead story on radio this morning with journalist Tony Eastley introducing AM with comment:

“Australia’s Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd has called for a global ban on asbestos, and he succeeded on the weekend in having the Labor party agree that Australia lead the push to shut the industry down.”

Shut the industry down! That simple? But who might be disadvantaged? I’ve a problem with the ever-increasing number of popular campaigns that promoting the banning of things without first some consideration of the benefits of the product.

Quoting from John Berlau:

“IN the nineteeth and twentieth centuries, Americans were building the new republic. Although they were busy tending to their farms and their jobs, they were also constantly innovating, building a better life for their children. And they were literally building the better life through the structures they built. Steamboas and then other types of ships made travelling easier than ever before. Big new theaters would open up, making plays and musical revues no longer the privilege of the wealthy few. Education also was no longer the privilege of rich children with private tutors, as parents and communities banned together to build schools.

“What all these structures had in common was that they would house large groups of people gathering together. But with these new opportunities for betterment came danger – the specific danger of fire. Not only were there crowds of people, the methods of powering the activities in the structures presented unknown risks. We were just learning about the properties of steam, kerosene, and electricity. Several large-scale tragedies ensued.

“But several more were prevented because of the use of asbestos. New ways of refining this old material meant that fire protection, too, was no longer just the privilege of the elite.”

According to Berlau because asbestos is not incorporated into modern warships they are that much more vulnerable to fire.

“The number of casualties caused by burns in the Royal Navy warships during the Falkland war and on the USS Stark when the latter was hit by an Exocet missile in the Persian Gulf, was appreciably greater than expected because of the exclusion of asbestos insulation from these ships.”

What are other important uses of asbestos? Can’t the product be used in ways that give advantage, while safeguarding the health of workers?

*******
Eco-Freaks: Environmentalism is Hazardous to Your Health by John Berlau, Nelson Current, 2006

New Murray Darling Basin Plan Based on Meaningless Averages

By

THE Murray-Darling Basin Plan can’t deliver anything tangible and meaningful for communities, industry or the environment while its water sharing plans are based on averages.

Averages are a meaningless concept in the real world given the highly variable nature of Australian rainfall. 
The draft plan identifies 10,873 gigalitres as the maximum amount of water on water that can be “sustainably” extracted from the Basin on average each year.

But this number is a product of politics, not science, and has no real meaning in terms of river health.

The draft plan acknowledges the highly variable nature of the system – Schedule 1 explains annual inflows to the Basin in the past 114 years have ranged from a high of 117,907GL in 1956 to only 6740 GL in 2006 – and
notes this natural variability of flows is important to Basin ecology.

Yet this variability is then ignored in arriving at one number: the sustainable diversion limit of 10,873GL based on a calculated average inflow to the entire Murray Darling Basin of 31,599GL.
The draft plan gives the impression there has been gross over-allocation of this average inflow by claiming on average only about 12,000GL reaches the Murray Mouth – hinting that much more water should flow out the Murray ‘s Mouth to the sea.

[Read more…] about New Murray Darling Basin Plan Based on Meaningless Averages